[FoRK] The rise of the Nones

Survey says... The name is an artifact of the surveys, and not great
overall since it is not subject-specific, however it is nicely neutral.
http://www.usatoday.com/news/religion/2009-03-09-american-religion-ARIS_N.htmhttp://www.usatoday.com/news/religion/2009-03-09-ARIS-faith-survey_N.htm
Excerpts:
> The percentage of people who call themselves in some way Christian has
> dropped more than 11% in a generation.
> These dramatic shifts in just 18 years are detailed in the new
> American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS), to be released today.
> It finds that, despite growth and immigration that has added nearly 50
> million adults to the U.S. population, almost all religious
> denominations have lost ground since the first ARIS survey in 1990.
> So many Americans claim no religion at all (15%, up from 8% in 1990),
> that this category now outranks every other major U.S. religious group
> except Catholics and Baptists. In a nation that has long been mostly
> Christian, "the challenge to Christianity … does not come from other
> religions but from a rejection of all forms of organized religion,"
> the report concludes.
> It found that 41% of people had switched their religion at some point
> in life.
> Kosmin concluded from the 1990 data that many saw God as a "personal
> hobby," and that the USA is "a greenhouse for spiritual sprouts."
>> Today, he says, "religion has become more like a fashion statement,
> not a deep personal commitment for many."
> The ARIS research also led in quantifying and planting a label on the
> "Nones" — people who said "None" when asked the survey's basic
> question: "What is your religious identity?"
>> The survey itself may have contributed to a higher rate of reporting
> as sociologists began analyzing the newly identified Nones. "The Nones
> may have felt more free to step forward, less looked upon as outcasts"
> after the ARIS results were published, Keysar says.
>> Oregon once led the nation in Nones (18% in 1990), but in 2008 the
> leader, with 34%, was Vermont, where Nones significantly outnumber
> every other group.
> Meabh Fitzpatrick, 49, of Rutland, Vt., says she is upfront about
> becoming an atheist 10 years ago because "it's important for us to be
> counted. I'm a taxpayer and a law-abiding citizen and an ethical
> person, and I don't think people assume this about atheists."
>> Not all Nones have made such a philosophical choice; most just unhook
> from religious ties.
> Ex-Catholic Dylan Rossi, 21, a philosophy student in Boston and a
> Massachusetts native, is part of the sharp fall in the state's
> percentage of Catholics — from 54% to 39% in his lifetime.
>> Rossi says he's typical among his friends: "If religion comes up,
> everyone at the table will start mocking it. I don't know anyone
> religious and hardly anyone 'spiritual.' "
> Membership in New England's Catholic churches is shrinking as older
> Catholics have died or moved to sunnier climates. Young adults are
> choosing non-Catholic partners, having civil weddings and skipping
> baptism for their babies. And those moving in to areas served by the
> churches are young adults who often find their communities of work and
> friendship online, not in parish halls.
Note the Ohio reference.
> In Mount Pleasant, S.C., a suburb of Charleston, "everyone from Ohio
> is here," says Msgr. James Carter, pastor of Christ Our King Catholic
> Church. The church has grown so big so fast that it has spun off
> another parish and a mission church, and it plans outdoor split-shift
> services for Easter to accommodate about 2,500 families.
> Like Gautier, the Rev. Kendall Harmon, theologian for the Episcopal
> Diocese of South Carolina, blames social mobility.
>> "Mobility means your ideas are more challenged and your family and
> childhood traditions have less influence, particularly if you are not
> strongly rooted in them. I see kids today who have no vocabulary of
> faith, and neither do many of their parents."
>> Harmon recalls, "A couple came into my office once with a yellow pad
> of their teenage son's questions. One of them was: 'What is that guy
> doing hanging up there on the plus sign?' "
!!
> Kosmin and Keysar also found a "piety gap" in how Americans understand
> God: While 69% say they believe in a personal God, the Judeo-Christian
> understanding of the Almighty, an additional 30% made no such connection.
>> The piety gap defines the primary sides in the culture wars, Kosmin says.
>> "It's about gay marriage and abortion and stem cells and the family.
> If a personal God says, 'Thou shalt not' or 'Thou shalt' see these a
> certain way, you'd take it very seriously. Meanwhile, three in 10
> people aren't listening to that God," he says.
>> "There's more clarity at the two extremes and the mishmash is in the
> middle," Keysar adds.
>> Mark Silk, director of the Greenberg Center for the Study of Religion
> in Public Life at Trinity College, sees in the numbers "an emergence
> of a soft evangelicalism — E-lite — that owes a lot to evangelical
> styles of worship and basic approach to church.
>> "But E-lite is more a matter of aesthetic and style and a considerable
> softening of the edges in doctrine, politics and social values," Silk
> says.
http://content.usatoday.com/communities/religion/post/2009/03/63756713/1
> Kosmin, then a CUNY Graduate Center sociologist, said,
>> It's a residual tribal thing. You've got people who don't go to
> church, don't go to Mass and yet repeatedly tell people they are
> Catholic or Protestant.
> Eighteen years later, the new ARIS appears to prove them right.
> Americans are more disengaged from traditional religious denominations
> and Judeo-Christian ideas about God than ever before. And yet, the
> language of political persuasion used by the conservative right and
> progressive left is still steeped in Biblical morality and ethics.
sdw